Microsoft may be building touch-friendly features into Windows 8 to optimize the operating system for tablets, but that isn’t stopping the company from pushing out apps for other tablet platforms. Today Microsoft launched Bing for iPad, bringing Microsoft’s search, weather, news, and other information to Apple’s tablet.
The Bing home screen is a looker, with a different high quality background image each day. The app also takes advantage of the iPad’s large screen to gie you a search box at the top and tabs at the bottom showing weather, news, finance, and other information at a glance.
At the most basic level, you can use Bing for iPad as a search engine. But you can also use the maps feature to get driving directions, the movie section to find show times and reviews, and the weather section to get detailed forecasts, among other things. The image search interface is particularly attractive, presenting you with images matching your query on a large grid.
The app features gesture-based navigation, letting you swipe from one screen to the next for more information.
Bing for iPad is available as a free download from the App Store.